Work

Cool. Microsoft is ready to ship virtual server.

VNC with bells and whistles? We’ll see. If it’s from Microsoft it’s easier to get the green light to use it. I’m still leery of this ‘fake server consolidation’ thing. Generally speaking we put stuff on separate servers because we are splitting the tasks that they do across hardware.

We’ll see, I’m always for a paradigm shift.

Waaaay back in July I had a “runin” of sorts with the auditor over a CERT advisory.

Well, CERT has issued a new advisory. Upgrade to SP2 as soon as possible. Do not wait 30 days. Do not wait for the CD to be delivered. Upgrade now.

Fun. I’ve been saying the same thing in hundreds of debates for weeks now. The time where you can simply sit back and wait to see if critical patches are going to be reneg’d on is past. Test everything first. But when you are done with your testing, install. Fast. Because the mean time to a virus being deployed after an exploit is found is down to less than a week.

That scares me.

Sadly, this advisory will not get nearly the publicity that the anti-IE advisory got. Which is, I guess, typical. However thankfully I’ll have this advisory archived here at Ensight so I can pull it up should the auditor come’a runnin’ again.

I’ve been posting on this all over the web and I’m fed up with it. The premise of some people’s issues with SP2 is that Dialup users won’t be able to benefit from this 100MB+ download because they won’t be able to (or be able to afford” to) download this monster update. What people don’t realise is what BITS does. People who have XP have been using the first generation BITS client for ages.

The next version is even smarter and downloads before XP SP2 does.

The biggest change to the next generation client is that it allows for latent, resumable, seamless downloads of updates.

Let’s walk through this a little bit in really simple language so everyone gets the concept:

Latent: It doesn’t use up your Internet connection. It’ll use what you aren’t using, but release it as soon as you need it. Essentially, your browsing experience won’t change.

Resumable: When you disconnect from the internet, BITS doesn’t care. As soon as you reconnect it continues to use your latent bandwidth.

Seamless: It’ll download multiple updates and only present them to you in the order they need to be installed.

What does this mean? It means that no, users won’t suddenly flock to broadband, cause them to order CD’s, or any other such behaviour. Unless they want to, of course.

Certain people should know better. Like Joe Wilcox in his piece today:

Or, maybe, as I believe, the company is betting too much on distribution via Windows Update. Considering the large number of dial-up users, many using Windows XP, I think Microsoft would do better to get out as many CDs as possible to as many people that want them as quickly as the update discs can humanly–or mechanically–be shipped.

Heck, even people at Microsoft are saying folk should order CD’s because using dialup would be such a pain. Certain people should know better.

Especially when the CD could reasonably take over a month to get to you. No, if you’ve got the new BITS client and are concerned about speed, it’s the fastest way to get the update. Period.